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Tag: Douglas Murray

Jordan Peterson has called bull on the left’s claims that SJW media maven Cathy Newman has been a victim of “threats” and“alt-right” bullying.

In his first video appearance since totally owning Newman in a must-watch Channel 4 studio discussion on feminism, free speech and social justice, Peterson expressed regret at having given any credence to the threat claims.

Because there is no evidence that these “threats” were credible, Peterson now wishes he had never tacitly endorsed their existence when he asked his Twitter followers to “back off” from being rude to Newman.

His critics just exploited this by using it as proof that threats had indeed been made.

Isn’t it just the best thingthat we’ve finally got a President of the USA who calls a shithole a shithole?

In fact of all Donald Trump’s many qualities, I think this may be his greatest and his most underrated strength.

But you’re not supposed to say this. At least not in respectable company. Even now – after all his incredible achievements – you’re still only allowed to praise Donald Trump if first you’ve preceded it with lots of disclaimers about how much you deplore his sexism, his brashness, his incoherence and general uncouthness…

I’m not buying that virtue-signalling crap, though. Check out this short film I made on Trump for the BBC this week:

Look at the faces of the dead or missing children from the Manchester suicide bombing. Think about how their friends and families are feeling right now; imagine the terror and pain those around them must have experienced as they fled or lay wounded amid the glass, shrapnel, blood and faeces; mourn the young lives cut so callously short.

Do all these things now, while you can, while the emotion is still raw, because in a few days those innocents will be forgotten (except by the loved ones whose happiness will, of course, remain permanently blighted), the politicians will have said their usual stuff and the media circus will have moved on.

Make no mistake this is what the head-in-the-sand liberal establishment wants you to do.

It may not be official policy – no one would be crass enough to write it down or codify it. But across the world from San Bernardino to Mumbai, from Stockholm to Berlin, from Paris to Manchester, the modus operandi is the same: a swift burst of shock and outrage, very quickly dampened down by the regulation-issue call to “get on with life and thank the nurses”, a candle-lit vigil and an almost indecently hasty memorial service, followed by virtual oblivion.

I talked about this recently to Douglas Murray (guest of my next podcast) whose new bestseller The Strange Death of Europe asks, among other questions, how it is that we have come to value Western culture so lightly that we are now apparently prepared to allow it to be swamped and obliterated by the combined forces of mass immigration and militant Islam.

Murray’s view is that it’s because we don’t want to face up to the horror that, even now, is engulfing us.

If we can scrub away those pesky bloodstains ASAP and get the memorial services over with (in the case of the victims of Westminster terrorist Khaled Massood before their bodies were buried) then maybe all the horrid stuff we don’t want to deal with will somehow disappear.

So on we shall continue in our fool’s paradise like the Eloi – the fragile, graceful, proto-hippy folk in HG Wells’s The Time Machine. They live a life of (delusional) ease, peace and beauty. But the terrible price they pay for this is to be devoured, at intervals, by the savage and barbaric Morlocks.

This is how it will end: not with a whimper but an endless succession of bangs.

More bad news from Nice: we learn from the BBC that local Muslims have been getting the cold shoulder from theirkuffar neighbours. “People who yesterday would embrace me warmly are now cold towards me,” says one.

And all because of the unfortunate and terribly unfair coincidence that the man who mowed down over 100 people in a truck just happened to be called Mohamed, of Tunisian descent, and allegedly yelling “Allahu Akbar” as he went about his murderous spree.

“The worst affected by these attacks are us, the Muslims. We have seen an increase in abuse and threats,” complains local man Ahmed Mohamed.

Another – Abdul Moniem – has some sage things to say about not pointing the finger of blame.

“You have to distinguish between different types of crime. Are these crimes that relate to terrorism? Or are these individual criminal acts? In this case what happened was a terrible crime and shouldn’t be treated as terrorism. The criminal who carried out this attack did not pray or fast…he had social and relationship problems. It was this that led him to hurt people.”

The BBC is very concerned about this outbreak of ‘Islamophobia’. That would be why it sent a reporter – also called Mohamed – to down to investigate.

But I’ve a strange feeling that not many of you reading this – unless, perhaps, your name is Mohammed, or you are LBC’s resident faux-Cockney dhimmi James O’Brien, or you work for the BBC yourself – are going to be shedding bitter tears for Nice’s Muslim community right now. In fact you may well suspect that reports like this are very much part of the problem not the solution.

It’s really not much different from the pieces he wrote after the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the Paris massacre. But then, barring a few details – innocents mashed with a truck rather than, as at Bataclan, either shot, blown up or tortured by having their testicles cut off or their vaginas stabbed – the situation remains just the same as it ever did: with the chattering classes, the politicians, most of the media, and virtually the entire Umma still in denial of the nightmare problem facing us.

1. “It will create uncertainty.” (Usually followed by the phrase “…and business hates uncertainty…”)

This is, literally, an infantile argument. Babies live in the present and want everything now. Grown ups understand the importance of deferred gratification – that is you need to accept a certain amount of present pain (be it the tedium of learning your times tables or practising your golf swing) in order to enjoy future gain.

It also dishonestly assumes that the status quo is always preferable to the instability caused by change. If this were so, no one would ever divorce their nightmare of a wife/husband or move to a bigger, more comfortable house. Nor would Britain have quit the European Exchange Mechanism (an action which led to a decade’s economic growth) or gone to war with Adolf Hitler.

And it’s woefully short-termist. We’re not voting on what’s going to happen to the sterling or the FTSE or even the jobs market in the next few months or years. We’re deciding on what’s best for the long term wellbeing of Britain and her people.

2. “The pound will fall“.

It may. (Benefitting UK exporters whose products will become, relatively, better value) Then it may rise. Or not. This is one of the advantages of having a floating exchange rate: the price of sterling is a reflection of how Britain’s economic prospects are seen vis a vis the rest of the world, rising and falling in accordance with economic cycles, acting as a corrective mechanism that brings stability. Unlike the poor sods in the Eurozone who have to put up with a one-size-fits-all-currency run in the interests of Germany.

3. “It grants us a place at the top table“

Yes, a table that we’d be sitting at anyway owing to the fact that we’re the world’s fifth largest economy with the world’s fourth highest military budget, which once owned, ran or traded with more than half the atlas, which invented most of the world’s sports, wrote most of its best literature and which speaks the universal language (because we invented that too).

4. “Membership of a club.”

Whose exorbitant (£18 billion a year) annual membership fee entitles us to what, exactly? Overpriced food and drink kept high by protectionism and tariffs? Check. A non-exclusive admissions policy which means that each year we have to accept more and more riff raff who won’t even observe the club’s most basic codes (no raping in the billiard room, etc)? Check. An ever-increasing body of pettifogging rules and regulations which make it harder to do business or indeed anything else we want without some finger-wagging busybody telling us “No you can’t use your usual weedkiller on the garden anymore. Nor can you buy alphonso mangoes. Nor will we allow you a kettle that comes to the boil quickly. Das ist Verboten!”? Check. Crap facilities increasingly under strain because of all the new club members? Check.

If only the British Expeditionary Force had stayed behind in Dunkirk in 1940 to be annihilated: that would have taught Herr Hitler a lesson he would never have forgotten. And what about all those idiot smokers thinking it might be a good idea to give up their healthy habit? Or the gamblers who’ve just made a fortune on the roulette table and are now wondering whether to reinvest it on number 13? Quitters: what do they know about anything, eh?

Which of these two categories of people is more likely to murder you while you’re lying on a beach in Tunisia/shopping in the Westgate mall/enjoying a rock concert in Paris/sightseeing in Bombay/checking out the delights of Ouagadougou/watching a marathon/attending a Christmas party in San Bernardino?

a) agents of Vladimir Putin

b) Islamists

Ooh tricky one. Before I give my answer, can I just make one thing clear: I’m not in any doubt of the devilish capabilities of Putin and his Federal Security Service (FSB). As the detailed report last week by High Court judge Sir Robert Owen made clear, they were almost certainly responsible for the clandestine assassination using Polonium-210 of the naturalised UK citizen Alexander Litvinenko. It also seems more than likely that theymurdered Gareth Williams, the MI6 agent whose body was found mysteriously zipped into a sports bag.

Putin, quite evidently, would not be any liberal Westerner’s idea of the perfect Russian president: everything from his killing of journalists and political opponents to his monstrous corruption to his meddling in Ukraine (and even Western allies like Estonia) is proof enough of that.

All that said, the answer is still b)

And I think that may explain the curious response to a BBC radio phone-in I heard the other day where callers were giving their verdict on the Litvinenko report. Basically – and much to the chagrin of the show’s presenter – none of them gave a damn. They thought it was a Russian problem, not a British one. Yes, Litvinenko may have been a UK citizen – but he was also a former FSB agent. This is just the sort of thing that happens in the murky world of espionage, went the callers’ thinking. We’ve got bigger things to worry about.

Now I’m not saying they’re right to be quite so blasé about Putin. Clearly, it is an arrogant provocation when foreign intelligence services murder our own citizens — putting other citizens at risk of Polonium-210 poisoning — on our soil. Also, Litvinenko was a decent man — with a wife and son — doing good work exposing the links between organised crime and the Putin regime.

But I do understand the sentiment behind it which seems to me to show a grasp of Realpolitik quite beyond that of our naive political leadership.

Clubbing and drugging

Eddy Temple Morris. I am not worthy

To listen to some of the people on Twitter you’d think all I ever did in life is go round being evil, abusing hamsters, stealing rusks from toddlers, hampering the noble work of the selfless scientists trying to save the planet from global warming, etc.

But actually I do find time for other stuff, you know. For example, I happen to have been blessed with really excellent taste in music and as part of my outreach work to the community I regularly recommend albums which may have skipped most punters’ notice in order to bring joy and good after-dinner sounds into their otherwise squalid, miserable and thankless lives. (Still really recommend the John Grant Queen of Denmark album, btw. That would be the topmost of my top tips from the last couple of years).

What I’m not, though, I’m afraid, is down with the kids. The last cultish yoof genre I really got into was drum n bass – and that was well over ten years ago. Problem is if you’re not going clubbing or taking the right drugs, you’re never going to keep up. (Simon Napier Bell has a fascinating theory on this in his seminal Black Vinyl White Powder: he says the most important people in the development of pop culture are gay men because, having a clubbing and drugging career so much more extended than heteros who tend to get married, have children and turn staid, is that they keep the old traditions alive while easing the transition into the new ones).

For example, if you listen to the thing I’m about to recommend you realise I’m hopelessly not up to speed on dubstep. A man who is, though, is one of my best old schoolfriends Eddy Temple Morris who has ended up as one of Britain’s most successful DJs, with a long-running show on XFM (remixes and mash-ups are his speciality), residencies in Ibiza, the works.

He’s also one of the nicest men you could possibly hope to meet, so I was fascinated to discover a few years ago when I was grumbling about the flak I get (and that was in the old days when I got way, way less than I do now) and he said to me: “You’re kidding aren’t you? If people hate you it means you’ve arrived.”

Eddy is massively talented. Anyone, I think, who has ever seen one of his live sets will know exactly what I mean. (When I’m 50 I definitely want him playing at my birthday party). Yet it turns out that amount of hate he still gets is tremendous. “Look you’ve got to realise, it’s not necessarily about you. It’s about them. If you’re in the public eye people want a pop at you because they’re kind of upset that you’re there and they’re not.” Eddy’s policy is generally to be nice to these people and empathise with their pain. It’s not mine but then, I’m not as nice as Eddy.

Anyhoo, the trolls will all now be thinking this is some kind of personal therapy session about the perils of minor celebrity, but it’s not. All I was really trying to do was cobble a few interesting words together just so I could promote this.

It’s a podcast Eddy and I have done together for Ricochet – the latest episode of my ongoing series Radio Free Delingpole. Usually my podcasts are about US politics (I recommend the recent ones I did with Toby Young and Douglas Murray), but this one is totally about music. You will hear me discovering that my tastes aren’t nearly as cool as I thought they were (though Eddy lets me down very gently), as well as learning what Moombahton is and who Skrillex is. (I really REALLY like Skrillex.)